La Clé des Champs: My Childhood in the Fields

La Clé des Champs was released late last year, whilst I was in the thick of exams, but I managed to see one of the last screenings yesterday. Using exquisite footage of a marsh microcosm, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou capture the summer of a city boy spent at an abandoned marsh, a theatre of natural splendour, a stage of the mini-sagas of life. As a child, innocent, inquisitive and carefree, such natural spaces provide an unlimited source of joy.

My strongest memories of childhood are of exploring the backwoods behind our house, collecting frogspawn and tadpoles from the murky ponds and building houses for spirits. Over long summers in France with my family I would be shooed outside, commanded by my brother to construct dams. But whilst searching for perfect fitting rocks, I would end up distracted, fascinated by the caddisfly larvae casings on the river bed. Other times, we would collect woodlice, weave together twigs or race snails against one another. I have a vivid memory of catching an enormous cricket in my hands, running after my parents to show them, only to reveal a strong smelling yellow secretion but no cricket.

The freedom and fascination of youth is to be treasured, and I look back now with a deep longing when superficial day to day worries lodge in the back of my mind. The wilds were not an escape, or a release, but simply an immediate source of being, comfort, and revelation. Sheltered from suffering, loved by my family, the fields and forests were not a threatening unknown, but an inviting adventure, an eductation in understanding and a window to the wider world.